Bioinformatics

Bioinformatics Listeni/ˌbaɪ.oʊˌɪnfərˈmætɪks/ is an interdisciplinary scientific field that develops methods for storing, retrieving, organizing and analyzing biological data. A major activity in bioinformatics is to develop software tools to generate useful biological knowledge. Bioinformatics is a distinct science from biological computation, the latter being a computer science and computer engineering subfield using bioengineering and biology to build biological computers, whereas bioinformatics simply uses computers to better understand biology. Bioinformatics is similar to computational biology and has similar aims to it but differs on scale: whereas bioinformatics works with basic biological data (e.g. DNA bases), i.e. it works on the small scale paying attention to details, computational biology is a subfield of computer science which builds large-scale general theoretical models of biological systems seeking to expand our understanding of them from an abstract point of view, just as mathematical biology does with mathematical models.

Bioinformatics uses many areas of computer science, statistics, mathematics and engineering to process biological data. Complex machines are used to read in biological data at a much faster rate than before. Databases and information systems are used to store and organize biological data. Analyzing biological data may involve algorithms in artificial intelligence, soft computing, data mining, image processing, and simulation. The algorithms in turn depend on theoretical foundations such as discrete mathematics, control theory, system theory, information theory, and statistics. Commonly used software tools and technologies in the field include Java, C#, XML, Perl, C, C++, Python, R, SQL, CUDA, MATLAB, and spreadsheet applications.[1][2][3]